it's good for thing like images and text with weird encodings.

and made the cmd_* functions public

The commit affb81446811bb35619b793ada17a32eff1aa28e, with its out-of-bound fix, broke forward-char outside the minibuffer.

<> → "" and reorder

There are two ways (by default) to bring up the execute-extended-command: M-x or :. To be a bit more like vi, don't add a space after :, but do that after M-x.